Summary

This group of
materials opens with a dialogue between Mark Lipovetsky (University of
Colorado) and Irina Sandomirskaya (University College of South Stockholm) «How
not to complete Bakhtin? Correspondence from two electronic corners». The
authors systematically dispute the reputation of Bakhtin currently forming in
Russian humanitarian studies as primarily a religious thinker, genetically
linked to the tradition of Russian early 20th century religious
philosophy. Lipovetsky and Sandomirskaya discuss the recently published
fragment of Bakhtin’s 1940s draft (it starts with the line “Rhetoric, to the
extent of its mendacity…»). The two participants show that Bakhtin interprets
the word as a repressive authority (his intentions, as Lipovetsky and
Sandomirskaya suggest are akin to the works of Walter Benjamin and Georges
Bataille, as well as to the approaches of Michel Foucault and Jaques Derrida),
discuss Bakhtin’s idea of a “grotesque body” and show that the understanding of
dialogism in Bakhtin’s works was fundamentally polemical and had little in
common with tolerant omniacceptance.

Other
articles of that collection serve as commentaries on the provocative dialogue
of Mark Lipovetsky and Irina Sandomirskaya. In an article «Right to a voice»
Irina Popova (Russian State Humanitarian University — RSUH), who served as an
academic commentator on the text «Rhetoric, to the extent of its mendacity…»
(in the new collection of Bakhtin’s oeuvres), insists on the importance of the
philological component of the Russian thinker’s creative work. From Popova’s
point of view, literature for Bakhtin in no way served just as a secondary
field of application of properly philosophical means of raising the “last
questions”, as Lipovetsky, Sandomirskaya and modern “religious” apologists of
Bakhtin suggest.

Vladimir
Markovich (St. Petersburg State University) in the article «On “true” Bakhtin
and “real” Bakhtin» studies various historical stages and types of adaptation
of Bakhtin’s works in the Russian philological community starting from the mid
1960. He stresses that current attitudes to Bakhtin among the Russian scholars
is autoreflective. He pays special attention to the literary hermeneutic
potential of Bakhtin’s works.

Craig
Brandist (The University of Sheffield) in his article «Necessity of
intellectual history» insists on the importance of studying the sources of
Bakhtin’s philosophising — in the first place Marburg neocantianism and Ernst
Cassirer’s ideas. He thinks that it is perfectly acceptable to talk of obsolete
or historically limited aspects of Bakhtin’s legacy that were to a large extent
predetermined exactly by that initial idealist philosophical program.

In his aside «The man of the
Moskvoshvey era» Evgeny Dobrenko (University of Nottingham) mainly pays
attention to the live literary and ideological background of
Bakhtin’s philosophising of the 1930s—1940s: the title of his article is an
allusion to a line from Osip Mandelsˇtam’s poem. The author suggests that
the «carnival theory» to a large extent grew from reflection on the social
anomie of the 1920s and mass repressions of the 1930s. He stresses that any
«modernising» interpretations of Bakhtin’s views will always remain dubious
because it discounts that historical background.

Sergei Ushakin (Princeton University) in his article
«Outside gredience: Bakhtin as one’s own Other» contests Mark Lipovetsky’s
thesis on the quasi-transcendental nature of Bakhtin’s category of
«transgredience». From Ushakin’s point of view, where Bakhtin and Jaques Lacan
are concerned, it is that metaphor of space that becomes a basis for formatting
and regularisation artistic and existential experience, a point of reference
for «collecting» the ever — in principle — fragmented and unfinished self.

CONTEXTS OF «RABELAIS»

This section is
devoted to Bakhtin’s most important book Rabelais and Folk Culture of the
Middle Ages and Renaissance (first published in 1965, english translation
is published under the title Rabelais and His World). Its new critical
edition is going to be published shortly as part of Mikhail Bakhtin’s collected
works.

Irina
Popova’s article «Lexical Сarnival
of Francois Rabelais: M.M. Bakhtin’s book in the context of French and German
methodological arguments of the 1910—1920s» studies the long prehistory of the
book — starting at the stage of conception and creation of the dissertation on
Rabelais at the end of the 1930s годов.
Popova brings Bakhtin’s book «back» out of the context of the methodological
arguments of the 1960—1970s (the works by Julia Cristeva and other authors) to
its original context: French and German philology of the first third of the 20th
century. Bakhtin’s interest in the works of Karl Vossler’s school and
especially in those of Leo Spitzer’s dealing with the issue of the «Other’s
word» began in the 1920s. And Baktin’s work on the sociology of language
written together with Valentin Voloshinov testifies to the fact that the switch
from studying the dialogical problematics of Dostoyevsky’s novels to
interpretations of Rabelais was determined by Bakhtin’s development.

Nikolay Pankov (Moscow State University Research
Library) in his article «Kerch terracottas and a problem of “classical
realism”: M.M. Baktin’s book on Rabelais within the context of Russian end of
the 19th century — beginning of the 20th century
antiquity studies» demonstrates the ways in which Bakhtin interpreted visual
arts. Greek figurines of «pregnant hags» found by archaeologists in the 1860s
when excavating the Bolshaya Bliznitsa burial mound (Taman peninsula, southern
Russia) gave Bakhtin grounds to discuss in his dissertation and his subsequent
book on Rabelais the images of grotesque body and «pregnant anility». The
author studies various interpretations of unfamiliar non-canonical imagery of
the Kerch terracotta figurines that are often close or parallel to those of
Bakhtin (those by Russian art historians Nikolay Kondakov and Boris Farmakovsky
and a philologist Boris Varneke), as well as similarities between his
interpretations and the ideas of a Russian classical culture scholar Olga
Freydenberg.

A BOOK
AS AN EVENT:

ROMAN
TIMENCHIK, «ANNA AKHMATOVA IN THE 1960s»

Roman Timenchik’s (Hebrew University of
Jerusalem) book «Anna Akhmatova in the 1960s» (Moscow & Toronto: Vodoley
Publishers & Toronto University Press, 2005) became an important episode in
modern philology: it combines exceptional philological professionalism
(including detailed critical reading of historical sources and Akhmatova’s
poetry) with a ground-breaking organisation of biographical narration: enormous
notes and excursions create a non-linear hypertext depicting not only Akhmatova
and her non-conformist self-determination and self-presentation within
Soviet culture but the workings of the Soviet society as a whole. Roman
Timenchik’s book is discussed in articles and essays by philologists Konstantin
Azadovsky (St. Pertersburg), Irina Kaspe (Moscow), Nikolay Kotrelev (Institute
of World Literature, Moscow), Аleksandr
Lavrov (Institute of Russian Literature [Pushkinsky Dom], St. Pertersburg),
Elena Mikhailik (University of New Southern Wales, Sydney) and Galina
Mikhailova (Vilnius University), history of culture scholar Aleksandr Etkind
(University of Cambridge), historian Dina Khapaeva (Smolny College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences, St. Petersburg), poet and philosopher Aleksandr Skidan (St.
Pertersburg), poets and essayists Natalia Gorbanevskaya (Paris) and Aleksei
Parshchikov (Köln).

IN MEMORIAM

This issue
contains two memorial sections. One is dedicated to the memory of a literary
historian and archivist Larisa Ivanova (1948—2006). Ivanova was working at the
Institute of Russian Literature (St. Pertersburg), her studies mostly to do
with the archives and oevres of the beginning of the 20th century
Russsian writers (Igor Severyanin, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Leonid Andreev). Tribute
to Ivanova is given by Nikolay Bogomolov (Moscow State University), Alexander
Dolinin (University of Wisconsin, Madison), Liubov Kiseleva (University of
Tartu, Estonia), Alexander Ospovat (UCLA), Roman Timenchik (Hebrew University
of Jerusalem), Konstantin Azadovsky (St. Pertersburg), Nikolay Kotrelev
(Institute of World Literature, Moscow). The section is concluded with a
complete bibliography of Larisa Ivanova’s works.

The second memorial section is dedicated to the memory
of a prominent Russian and Chuvash poet Gennady Aigi (1934—2006). Essays on
life and works of Gennady Aigi are offered by poets Olga Sedakova (Moscow) and
Sergei Zavyalov (Helsinki), literary scholar Atner Khuzangay (Cheboksary), as
well as a Swiss poet, literary critic and Aigi’s translator Mikael Nydahl (The
▒Ariel’ literature magazine and publishing house, Stockholm).

ARCHIVE AS A GENRE

One of the most
important trends in visual arts of the 1980s – beginning of the 2000s is the
aestethisation of archives, representation of an archive or a library as an
artistic object. Contemporary French artist Christian Boltanski once said in an
interview: «…I want to preserve traces of all things and all events. This
little memory that we create as unique personalities stands against the grand
memory, the memory of the books» (from the Russian translation).

Catastrophes
of the 20th century gave a special meaning to «little histories» as
evidence of fragility and unique nature of every human life. Modern artists and
writers find these testimonies more important than constructing the general
meaning of the tragedies. That kind of evidence perception leads to creating a
new concept of an archive as an aesthetical and ethical representation of human
life in all its uniqueness. Behavioural patterns, personal habits, oral
conversations could all be described as items «displaced» by the contents of a
historical process that allow us to deconstruct the «grand history» as a
depersonalised narrative. This section analyses new poetry and prose books
where the text is organised in accordance with archival principles.

An
article by a poet and essayist Aleksandr Barash (Jerusalem) «Archive as a
genre: architectonics of personal memory» discusses models of describing the
past in modern literature that can be linked to personal archives. It offers a
classification of the archive genre forms based on the books published in
recent years: from a «literary genesis archive» to a «quality of attitude
archive».

An
essay by a poet Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov (Moscow) is in itself related to
an archive – it is based on his correspondence with an artist and writer Grisha
Bruskin (New York); Prigov writes of Bruskin’s literature trilogy published in
2001—2005: in those books short poetry and prose notes are interchanged with
old

family archive
photos. Prigov’s letters analyse the most important aspect of archive as a
genre: its personal, private way of addressing every single reader. Bruskin
finds the means of bringing the solution to that problem into public space.

That
very problem — how to turn one’s personal attitude to a historical document
into public aesthetic action — becomes the subject of reflections by a poet and
artist Elizaveta Mnatsakanova (a.k.a. Netzkowa) (University of Vienna) in her
vast preface to the publication of the letters of art historian Nikolai
Khardzhiev (1903—1994) addressed to her. Nikolai Khardzhiev was a collector of
the largest existing archive of Russian avantgarde texts and art. Khardzhiev
saw the works of Mnatsakanova, who emigrated in 1975 and published in the West
only, as a congenial continuation of the Russian futurist tradition. He also
wrote to her of his meeting with Marina Tsvetaeva in 1941, analysed paintings
by Paul Klee, etc.

Danila
Davydov (Moscow) analyses the book «Words on paper» — the first complete
collection of Yuri Smirnov’s (1933—1978) poetry published in 2005. Yuri Smirnov
cannot be properly called an unofficial author: he regularly published books of
poetry in soviet publishing houses. However, about half of his poems were never
intended for print and were only shown to his friends. This review poses a
problem of inhomogeneity of an archive: those of Smirnov’s works that
were intended for print and those that never were possess different notional
modality and vary in their degree of conventionality and frankness and
therefore demand different operational modes of sympathy and aesthetic
reaction.

In
this issue is also presented an interview (previously unpublished) given by
Joseph Brodsky (1940—1996) to Mikhael Meylakh (Strasbourg UniversitèMarc
Bloc) in first half of 1990s.